OUR PEOPLE: MOHAMMAD RAHMAN

Newness and moving with speed to deliver on customer needs no matter how they choose to shop is more important than ever, which is what we focus on in our services like Alterations and Tailoring.

Nordstrom employs the most tailors in North America, and for the past 50 years, customers have used our Alteration and Tailoring services for everything from basic hems to more detailed finish work. One person who makes these services possible is Mohammad Rahman, our Tailor Shop manager at our Downtown Seattle store.

Mohammad started working for Nordstrom in 1992 as a part-time fitter. Over his 27-year career here, he has worked in stores across the country, hired and developed new talent, helped open new stores and even met his wife at Nordstrom. Today, he supports nearly 60 tailors across our Men’s, Women’s and Bridal Shop departments.

How did you first get into tailoring? I started learning tailoring at an early age from my mother. I had to work hard as a teenager to support my parents and 10 siblings. I continued to improve my skills and eventually owned my own tailor shop that employed 15 tailors before I moved from Afghanistan to the U.S. in 1990. Two years later, I got a job as a part-time fitter at Nordstrom in Pleasanton, California.

What’s your favorite part of your job? The people. I feel like I work in the United Nations because we have just about every country represented in our shop — so naturally we have the best potlucks! I also love being able to use all my experience and support the shop as my own. I have a sense of ownership in my work. I’m able to hire the best talent and play a key role in their development. I love working with our tailors and watching them grow.

I also love getting in front of the customer and problem solving as a team to see what we can do to help them feel good and look their best. We can’t always do everything, but I love working hard to find a solution that meets customer expectations.

What does an average day look like for you? There are no dull moments here…let me start with that! Having almost 60 people on the direct team in Seattle and working with hundreds of salespeople keeps me busy. Supporting the tailors and answering their questions is a majority of my job, but I also spend a good amount of time working with customers and problem solving with the team. The culture of collective support and curiosity is critical to our success and helps us to constantly improve. We do a lot of in-house training and development to help people reach their potential because alterations is becoming something of a lost art, and the level of talent required to deliver to our customers is not easy to find.

How is the Tailor Shop unique? Team members come to Nordstrom with their own way of working with customers and making alterations. Our work here is unique in that we’ve built a system so anyone can take measurements and make the alterations in a way that matches what our customer is expecting. We’ve taken each individual’s experience and the collective knowledge from all our stores to build that system. This also allows us to evaluate what works and what doesn’t so we can continue to provide the very best service. All the changes we make are always based on making the experience better for the customer.

Why do you like working for Nordstrom? Trust. Nordstrom has such trust and loyalty to its employees. It’s so easy to lose trust both with customers and employees — it takes years to build and seconds to lose. Nordstrom understands this and takes the mutual trust between employees and company seriously, which translates to a great employee experience, so we can create a great customer experience.

INTERESTED IN A CAREER AT NORDSTROM? Search our open positions!